Why your iPhone battery may be draining faster than usual and what you can do to fix it

There’s no disputing that iPhones are one of the best smartphones available on the market.

The iPhone powers incredible levels of technology but all this comes at a price to the battery life.

The battery on iPhones has always been a source of frustration for owners but this seems to have got worse for those who have downloaded the latest operating system.

Researchers who have downloaded the iOS 11 have found that it drains the battery more than twice as quickly as the iOS10 did.

Mobile security company Wandera analysed the battery decay of 50,000 iPhones and iPads that were used moderately to heavily and compared the average battery drain over three days to estimate the average.

Wandera have claimed that a phone with 100 per cent battery using iOS10 will last for 240 minutes while those on the latest system will last just 96 minutes.

The company said that some users have got so frustrated by the battery life issues that they have switched back to iOS 10.3.3 but the company has advised strongly against this.

A Wandera spokesperson said: “The more up to date your software, the more protected you are from hackers attempting to exploit your device and infiltrate your personal and corporate data.”

The company also said that users running the new system on older iPhone devices will experience worse battery drain than on newer models so not all users will be feeling the same frustration.

Apple have released two updates since the iOS11 came out and the most recent of these appears to have limited the battery drain.

Under new experiments, iOS11.0.1 had a battery drain time of 159 minutes meaning a 65 per cent improvement compared to iOS11.

However, the company said it was too early to experiment on the new 11.0.2 operating system.

Matt Vlasach, director of product at Wandera, said: “It is a simple reality of software: there will always be bugs in new major OS releases, which are constantly pushing the limits of the devices they are running on.

“This, in turn, burns battery and always causes a new uproar about battery performance.

“However, it is inevitable that these problems will be addressed and improved as time goes on, until the next major update.”

How you can save battery

Customers who are still unsatisfied with their battery life can take a number of steps to help it last longer.

The first is limiting the number of apps that can refresh in the background (Settings > General > Background App Refresh) and limiting the number of apps that can access your location in the background (Settings > Privacy > Location Services).

If that doesn’t make much difference, low power mode may be your best option until Apple pushes out new updates that will hopefully address excessive battery drain.